1. Technical Field
The present invention generally relates to extensible markup language (XML) and extensible stylesheet language transformations (XSLT), and more specifically to a method and system for dynamically generating rules for XML transformations.
2. Background of the Invention
Extensible Markup Language (XML) describes a class of data objects called XML documents. XML documents can be read and manipulated using an XML Document Object Model (DOM), which represents a tree view of the XML document in memory. Unlike Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in which the meaning of pre-defined tags is well understood by a browser, XML has no standard way of displaying XML documents. Extended Stylesheets Language (XSL) is a mechanism describing the rules by which an XML document can be transformed into another markup language like HTML and eventually be displayed by a browser.
An XSL document allows an XML web designer to include other XSL files. Typically, the web designer can create only a limited number of XSLT rules (or stylesheets). Therefore, there is a limited number of ways an XML document can be transformed. To extend the list of available rules, the web designer would have to create new rules and hardcode them into the XSL file. If, for example, a user would like to experiment with all page sizes or all background colors in his document, he might not have enough existing rules to cover all possible combinations of page sizes and colors. Some users might be able to create their own XSL rules. However, often users are not computer savvy and are not sure how to manipulate existing rules and they might not have access to a server where the rules are stored.
Therefore, what is needed is a way for a user to specify any possible display of parameters for a particular XML document.